History

More than a thousand Greeks had come to work in Sioux City's meatpacking industry in the years before Holy Trinity was founded, and before 1918 every one of them had to travel to Omaha, Nebraska, one hundred miles to the south, for occasional Orthodox services. In 1918, more than five hundred of those Greeks attended a meeting at a Knights of Columbus Hall, and under the leadership of Paikos K. Pappaphilipopoulos, who would later Americanize his name to Peter Nelson, they launched a fund drive to build a church of their own. In 1920 the community purchased a corner property near downtown Sioux City for $35,000, a parcel that included three houses, one of which served as a temporary church. Father Constantinos Harvelas was the parish's first pastor.

In the spring of 1925, the community laid the cornerstone of a permanent church on Annunciation Day, a moment of particular significance given the feast's connection to the beginning of the salvation of the world. The church edifice, designed by noted Sioux City architect William L. Steele, was completed by September and formally dedicated on October 4, 1925. It stands to this day as the oldest Greek Orthodox church building in Iowa and, in physical size, the largest. In July 1928, a group of mostly World War I veterans organized Sioux City AHEPA Chapter 191 under the leadership of George M. Paradise, who went on to become a municipal judge, and they immediately raised $5,000 in bonds to help retire the parish's debt. Through the 1950s the parish entered a period of progress under Father Constantine Hallick, whose long tenure as the parish's longest-serving priest saw the founding of the annual church bazaars, later evolved into Grecian Dinners, that have sustained parish revenues for generations.

In February 1996, a fire gutted the church's interior, a devastating blow to a community that had built and cherished the building for more than seventy years. A sixteen-member renovation committee raised the $600,000 needed to restore the interior, enlisting architect Christ Kamages of San Francisco, iconographer Elias Damianakis of Florida, and woodcarver Steve Kavroulakis of Crete, whose collective work produced a new altar, sanctuary, narthex, iconostasion, and iconography of remarkable beauty. Metropolitan Iakovos of Krinis rededicated the restored church in June 1999, calling Holy Trinity a jewel of the Midwest. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998, recognized for its architectural significance among Iowa's historic religious structures.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church at 900 Sixth Street in Sioux City serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of western Iowa and the tri-state region as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.